Flowers in a Berlin Park

Old photo, scanned

Spring flowers in a city park.  Berlin, Germany, about 1990.

Overheard at the Grocery Store

Preschooler humor

In the cereal aisle, I saw a little boy walking hand-in-hand with his mom. The little boy was having a giggle attack. "I'm going to call Daddy 'STUPID'!" he announced.

"That wouldn't be very nice," his mother said.

Another giggle attack. The little fellow could barely sputter out the rest of his joke. "I'm going to call Daddy 'Stupid' and I'm going to call you 'THE BUNNY RABBIT'!"

I didn't get to hear Mom's response to that.

Floods of Downtown Hopkinsville

High waters on the North Fork

These concrete lily pads provide a dry passage across Little River's North Fork. They are located just below the library in Hopkinsville, KY, near the intersection of Ninth and Bethel streets.

When my kids were little, they loved to leap from one circle to the next at this river crossing. I think one of them fell in the river once, but I don't remember if it was Keely or Isaac. Or maybe I just remember that I thought they were going to fall in. I'm really not sure.

Fortunately, the North Fork isn't very deep here, except when rainfall has been heavy. When the stream is high, the stepping stones and the walk approaches are covered by flood waters. Sections of the river walk may be inundated as well.

Before the watershed lakes were built on tributaries north of Hopkinsville, the North Fork (sometimes called the West Fork) came out of its banks whenever heavy rains fell.  When flood waters filled downtown Hopkinsville, water sometimes stood on Ninth Street as far east as the area of the old post office (the current Pennyrile Area Museum.)

In the big downtown flood of 1957, five feet of water stood at the intersection of Ninth and Main.Troops from Fort Campbell and National Guardsmen helped get people out of low-lying areas. Christian County suffered so much flood damage that President Eisenhower declared it a disaster area.

In a column about major Hopkinsville floods  ("Watching the Parade", Kentucky New Era, January 23, 1984), Joe Dorris wrote that the January 1937 flood was the worst one of the 20th century. Over 20 inches of rain fell in Christian County that month, creating recurrent flood conditions in Hopkinsville. Schools were closed and a typhoid epidemic was feared. 

High waters were not limited to Hopkinsville. Heavy rainfall across several states caused widespread flooding in the greater Ohio River valley and on down the Mississippi River.  Hopkinsville provided emergency shelter to flood victims from other cities, including Paducah and Louisville, and sent emergency supplies to the hard-hit towns of  Eddyville and Glasgow. I am impressed that Hopkinsville's citizens assisted other communities, even while coping with their own disaster.

Photos of the 1937 flooding in Louisville, KY can be seen at the website of the National Weather Service at Louisville.

Seen at the VA Medical Center

Quiet spots in a very busy place

Water garden at one of the entrances

Glowing Coke machine

Courtyard renovation

Dennis had two appointments at the VA Medical Center in Nashville today. He saw a physical therapist about his back and also got his eyes tested. I went along to take over the driving after his eyes were dilated.

Dozens (hundreds?) of people were traveling through the ground floor of the Medical Center. Some offices had lines that stretched down the hallways. Our first two waiting rooms were small and crowded. On the 4th floor, the elevators opened to a quiet, spacious waiting area. "I'll stay here," I told Dennis.

I had a stack of magazines in my bag, and I looked through five of them while I was waiting. I tore out the few pages that I wanted to save. Then I passed on the magazines by leaving them with the other reading material on the table. I also left several magazines in the waiting rooms downstairs.

Getting rid of those magazines in a good way and being there to drive my husband home were my two best (and only) accomplishments of this day.

No Shrinking Violets Here

Where did the idiom, "shrinking violet," originate?

These violets lift their pretty faces to the sun.

William Safire wrote that the earliest usage of the term "shrinking violet his researcher (Elizabeth Phillips) found was in the 1827 play, Sylvia, by George Darley. Fifteen pages into Darley's lyrical drama, Morgana, Queen of the Fairies, praises Floretta, Queen of the Flowers, for her kindness:

The shrinking violet thou dost cheer; and raise
The cowslip's drooping head: and once did'st cherish
In thy fond breast a snowdrop, dead with cold...

If Elizabeth Phillips could have searched Google Books, she would have found several earlier mentions of shrinking violets. In 1826, a poem by James Gates Percival, titled "The Perpetual Youth of Nature - A Soliloquy" was included in the book Miscellaneous Poems Selected from the United States Literary Gazette. Here is the relevant portion:

The wind is very low—
It hardly wags the shrinking violet,
Or sends a quiver to the aspen leaf,
Or curls the green wave on the pebbled shore...

A second reference to shrinking violets is found in "A Song Over the Grave of a Lover", in the same 1826 collection of poetry.

And I have sought
The lowly violet, that in shade appears,
Shrinking from view like young love's tender fears,
With sweetness fraught

And Dorothea Lynde Dix, in The Garland of Flora which was published in 1829, has a chapter about violets. From her collection of quotes about violets, I found an even earlier mention of the shy nature of violets (in Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore, published in 1817).

While she who sung so gently to the lute
Her dream of home steals timidly away,
Shrinking as violets do in summer's ray...

Safire thought the violets might be shrinking from the still-wintry winds of an early spring, based on a bit of poetry by John Byrne Leicester Warren from 1893. However the phrase by Moore, "shrinking as violets do in summer's ray," predates Warren's use of the idiom by 75 years and suggests that violets were said to shrink from the heat of the summer sun.